I built a Kubernetes cluster at home this year, three small nodes, the works, and I'm now fairly sure it was a mistake. A useful mistake, but a mistake.
The honest reason I did it was to learn. At work k8s is creeping in everywhere and I wanted to understand it where the stakes were a broken Pi-hole rather than a broken paycheque. On that count it delivered. I now understand services, ingress, persistent volumes and the particular misery of kubectl describe pod at a level I simply wouldn't from reading docs. The cluster was a brilliant teacher.
It's a rotten way to run a house, though. The control plane wants babysitting. Storage on bare metal is genuinely hard, and "my photos won't load" is a much worse outage at home than at work because the complainant lives with you. Every upgrade was an event. I spent more evenings keeping the cluster alive than I ever spent using the things it ran.
The thing it was meant to replace, a single box with docker-compose, did the actual job better, quieter, and with roughly none of the drama. I keep one node alive now purely as a sandbox for trying things, and the household-critical bits have quietly moved back to a Compose file that just works.
So: not a mistake as a course. A mistake as a way to keep the lights on. Learn it on hardware you're allowed to break, then run your house on something boring.